2009 Winter Tire Test

We compare four categories of tires able to deal with winter and come up with some surprising results.

What is the best tire for winter conditions? As with most of life’s serious questions, there isn’t a single, simple answer. Plus, as Bill Clinton correctly pointed out, “It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.”

There are various categories of tires that could reasonably be employed to deal with driving in the cold and snow. Are you looking for maximum traction on snow and ice? There’s a specific category of tire for that, labeled, honestly enough, “snow and ice” tires. Or perhaps you don’t want to conquer winter so much as survive it, using a set of all-seasons that can perhaps get the driving job done year-round.

During our devastating Michigan winters, a regular point of contention at C/D is whether to fit snow-and-ice tires or a newer category of winter tires, called “performance winter.” The snow-and-ice backers argue that there are few things greater than being endowed with superhero traction during a blizzard, which can lead to unforgettable role reversals such as blasting around a Crown Vic police cruiser struggling mightily to get up a slight grade and leaving it in a blur of swirling snow. (If any law officers are reading this, note that the above never happened.) The performance-winter faction rightly points out that even if you live in a metropolitan area that gets significant snowfall, most driving will nonetheless occur on plowed roads. And these guys, always thinking about maximum g’s, would give up some snow-and-ice traction for additional dry grip. Both tire types are to be used exclusively during winter (below temperatures of 35 degrees F), but the performance-winter variety comes with a higher speed rating and the promise of a more secure and connected feeling between the tire and a dry road, a feeling that is often lacking in snow-and-ice tires with their deeply grooved treads and soft, pliable rubber.

So, exactly how much does winter performance improve, and how much dry grip is lost among the various tire categories? Most tiremakers sell rubber in all these classes, but we asked Michelin to help us answer this question, partly because, in our experience, we’ve found its tires to be better than average, and we’ve also been itching to try its new X-Ice Xi2 snow-and-ice tire, which some tests have shown to be the new class champ.

Lesson one: Don’t call them “snow tires,” says Michelin. That’s what they were called when they were invented in the 1960s. Today they’re more appropriately called “winter tires,” as they’re designed to work on the four other surfaces encountered during winter in addition to snow: ice, slush, and wet and dry pavement. Unfortunately, the benefits of winter tires are largely lost on Americans, as sales comprise just three percent of the market here. Even in snowy regions of the U.S., the take rate is well below 10 percent. Canadians are apparently more clued in, as winter tires make up well over a third of new-tire purchases there—with large growth recently due to a Quebec law mandating their use. Overall, Michelin sells five times as many X-Ice tires than its “performance winter” model, the Alpin PA3.

To put the winter-only options into perspective, we brought along two all-season choices. Representing the mainstream is the Pilot HX MXM4, which is standard equipment on big-time sellers such as the Honda Accord and the Ford Fusion. The final tire, the Pilot Sport A/S, falls into the “ultra-high-perform­ance” all-season cat­ego­ry and is the highest dry-performance cat­ego­ry of tire that could reasonably be used on snow and ice. We didn’t bring a summer tire because driving on one in the snow is fool’s work. Take our word for it: The best possible outcome is that you’ll get stuck.

The plan was to use one of our favorite sports sedans, the 10Best-winning Infiniti G37, to test each of the four tires back-to-back in acceleration, braking, and handling on snow and ice as well as frigid wet and dry pavement. Certainly the G’s rear-drive athleticism and sharp steering would bring tire-to-tire insights quickly to light. But we hit a snag common in the search for winter tires, and we mention this to encourage you to keep compromise top of mind when exploring winter options. To enable more tire choices, wheels that are one or two inches smaller than the original size are often used for winter—if they’ll fit. In our case, all four of the tire models we wanted to test weren’t available in the 18-inch size of the manual-transmission G37 Sport model, and 17-inch wheels wouldn’t fit over that car’s upsized brakes, so we instead went with a base G37 with its more agreeable 17-inch wheels. All tires were 235/55 in size.

With that hurdle cleared, we got to testing. All of our braking and acceleration figures are averages from four runs, while grip levels are the average of a lap in each direction around a skidpad 300 feet in diameter, as is our normal procedure. Testing on ice is particularly tricky because of how dramatically grip levels vary—for that reason, Michelin doesn’t even attempt objective testing on ice with its tires—based on temperature, direct sunlight, or, in our case, a light snowfall that rendered the surface as much as twice as slippery from run to run, which nixed any chance of getting useful data. And remember, the particulars of the weather and driving conditions in your area—steep, unplowed roads or driveways versus quickly cleared urban highways—may lead to distinctly different choices. And there are further considerations, such as the fact that a front-wheel-drive car gets an inherent traction boost from its front-heavy weight distribution, so perhaps a tire with slightly less winter capability may be acceptable. Here are our findings, organized by tire, in order of increasing winter capability.